Lesson 55: Yes, I can land an airplane

Last Friday afternoon, the day after my night flight, I had another lesson with John. As with my last lesson with Mac, I expected that we’d go somewhere and do basics. And as with my last lesson with Mac, John wanted me to do landings.

I think there’s a pattern of thought here.

So we flew to Ramona. Wanting to do more than just landings, I asked John if we could fly to Ramona via a transit over Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. You may recall from a while back that this requires a somewhat convoluted take off from Montgomery in order to reach 2,900 feet as quickly as possible, because that’s the rule for making a civilian transition across Miramar. It’s also interesting (from my point of view) because you request that transition while entering the ground radio chatter at Montgomery. In other words, the first time you contact ground control to request taxiing and runway clearance, you ask for clearance to do a Miramar transition, and then let them tell you what runway to use.

So that’s what we did.  Nothing amazing, just a bit more polish around the edges in terms of refining planning and execution skills.

The landings at Ramona went well.  I did five in all, and I would say that one was acceptable, two were good, and two were very good.

The one that was only acceptable went something like this: I was coming in a bit low, so I feathered the throttle to add some RPMs and give myself a little lift.  But that’s actually misleading.  I didn’t really lift the plane; what I really did was slow the descent.

Then, as I crossed the runway threshold the throttle was still feathered.  I had it in my mind that I needed to land at idle, so once I was over the runway and doing my round out, I pulled the throttle back to idle.

BUMP!

The fact is, I was at a proper airspeed (70 knots) and I was descending smoothly.  I really didn’t need to pull all the way back to idle.  At least not that quickly.  If I had just left it where it was and continued my round out, all would have been well.  It was a learning experience.

And then it was back to Montgomery.

Ramona is a training airport where the FAA trains air traffic controllers.  The controller in the tower while we were landing seemed to be under instruction, and was being very cautious about putting people in the pattern, either for take off or for landing.  As a consequence, John and I sat at the end of the runway for excessive amounts of time every time we wanted to take off.  The geometry and such of Ramona meant that we were facing into the southern exposure of the afternoon sun, and in a glass cockpit of a Cessna, that meant that we were getting baked all afternoon.

The reason I bring that up is because when we went back to Montgomery, I opted to just fly straight back instead of transitioning across Miramar again.   We were both really fagged from the sun and heat, and I didn’t want to be dealing with any sort of unnecessary stress, however mild.

So we flew a vanilla route back, and did a straight in approach.  And the good news there was that I did an absolutely perfect landing in a crosswind.  Perfect!

So…Mac’s evaluated my landings, and now John has evaluated my landings.

Let’s see what happens next…